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On Tuesday 24th, there was an open meeting organized by the London Jewish Forum, backed and co-organized by the Jewish Leadership Council, at which Ken Livingstone spoke and answered questions from London's Jewish community. about his Mayoral bid and his past and present views.

The introduction given for Livingstone by the meeting chair Adrian Cohen, the very aimiable non-elected Labour loyalist who chairs the LJF, came across as an astounding piece of straight advocacy. He spent over five minutes presenting every possible positive piece of information he could dig up to show how positive and supportive Livingstone is and always has been towards the Jewish community. The repeated controversies and tensions were alluded to in the briefest of euphemisms. It was in contrast to the introduction he gave at the equivalent meeting for Boris Johnson, which, although friendly, warm and suportive, did not compare, did not amount to advocacy, and was nothing like as long and gushing.

Here's a YouTube clip of Adrian Cohen’s gush

Adrian Cohen's introduction confirms the case I’ve made here. What’s supposed to be a genuinely representative body for the whole Jewish community is now controlled and unacceptably biased to serve the political priorities of a Labour Party/liberal left and Peace-Now oriented unrepresentative group of millionaires, billionaires and party activists who do not reflect the political outlook of the Jewish community as a whole.

In the case of the London Mayoral election, it's as if they set out to do everything possible to window-dress Livingstone’s image, airbrush out and explain away his long established record of Jew-baiting and invoking anti-semitic allusions to attack Jews he doesn't like, and present him as a much misrepresented warm friend to the London Jewish community.

I don't think Adrian Cohen himself is a part of that inner group. He has honourable intentions, and like some other supporters of the present direction, may well have believed that he should do everything possible to avoid presenting a hostile or aggressive Jewish community face to Livingstone, and that his role was to help the audience take on board that Livingstone should not be regarded as a pantomime villain, and the fact that his record does include some positive actions towards the Jewish community recognised. There was an alternative, of course, which was to be polite and welcoming, to acknowledge some of the few high notes of Livingstone's relationship with the community when Mayor and then act as a facilitator.

It does say something about the dangers of an inward-looking largely non-elected politically highly compatible insider group holding the reins of access to dialogue between the Jewish community and local and national government that he could consider as acceptable an introductory speech instantly labelled by audience members other than myself as "a Party Election Broadcast", "ridiculous" and "unbelievable". Those were all spontaneous comments I heard from others I'd never met before who walked downstairs or stood outside with me after the meeting.

In my view, it represents a sort of political myopia which can be paralleled with that of Livingstone, except that his is malign, where theirs is misguided and unjustified, given their status should derive from genuinely representing rather than trying to manipulate the views of the wider Jewish community. Above all it springs from an unrepresentative and largely unaccountable group being able to take decisions about how to deal with challenges to the Jewish community, and opportunities to influence policy without having to subject their plans to scrutiny. Behind that, they've a shared belief that, at best, they know what the community wants, or at worst, they know best and it's a utopian fantasy to operate any other way.

There are those who take the view (and I'm told that it's a view amongst some of those who ran this meeting) that Livingstone will win the London Mayoral election, and it's therefore important to have a Jewish community group who can speak to Livingstone rather than further promoting the widely perceived view of the organized Jewish community being hostile to him. But in my view, that's a self-serving and highly misguided argument, based on an either-or choice of two extremes. It would have been perfectly possible to have a policy of engaging with Livingstone and inviting him to meet the Jewish community, whilst adopting at least the same level of stringent neutrality to him as a candidate as would be expected of a broadcasting service. In a very close election, being seen to have been leaning over backwards to present a highly controversial candidate in the best possible light is totally unacceptable for a supposedly whole-community body.

In the course of the discussion in the video clip at the head of the post, there's a question asked about why Livingstone’s so called “apology” to the Jewish community included the astounding statement that Jews are a people, not an ethnic group or a rellgion. The response by both Adrian Cohen and by Livingstone was that this was what the Jewish Leadership Council and London Jewish Forum strongly pressed him to write, so he wrote it. In other words, not only was the ‘apology” not his own sentiments, but Adrian Cohen and his colleagues openly acknowledge their role in helping draft it. Adrian Cohen appears to see the statement as perhaps the unfortunate consequence of his attempts to explain to Livingstone the nature of Jewish peoplehood, but it does not account for Livingstone having written that Jews are not a religion and are not an ethnic group.

Again, I find it difficult to stress sufficiently how utterly out of order this bit of partisan spinning and lobbying is for a whole Jewish community representative body to have indulged in, and how utterly cynical it shows Livingstone to be when in pursuit of votes.

Livingstone consistently presented himself as a mild-mannered friend to the Jewish community, in favour of a two state solution, against suicide bombing anywhere, and ahead of his time in seeing the way to Middle East peace before the Jewish community and Israel.

You'll hear in the clip at the head of this post Livingstone's repeated assertions that he "doesn't agree with" the extremist hate preacher Qaradawi's strong support of suicide bombings and killings of Jews of every age in Israel.

But consider this. At least two young British Jews were murdered in Israel since the Hamas campaigns of bombing buses and stabbing lone Jews took off.

Shmuel Mett, a Mir Yeshiva student about to be married, was stabbed to death walking through the Old City back to his Yeshiva in Jerusalem circa 2007.

Yoni Jesner, a promising 19 year old university student spending the summer on a Bnei Akiva youth movement visit, was murdered in a bus bombing in Tel-Aviv.

Many London Jews knew one or both of these young men personally.

Bnei Akiva is the largest and most popular youth movement of the mainstream Orthodox and Yoni Jesner was a well loved and admired young leader in the movement.

Shmuel Mett was the son of a former teacher at the Hasmonean High School, and studied at the Mir Yeshiva, which is the most revered and prestigious of the great Charedi Yeshivas in Israel, where many strictly Orthodox and mainstream orthodox young men from London choose to spend a period of study.

As you can hear on the clip, Livingstone was repeatedly pressed about his embrace of Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hate preacher who advocates suicide bombings and murders of Jews in Israel as a religious obligation.

But look at what he said at the meeting when repeatedly pressed to give an assurance that he would not be inviting Qaradawi or any other hate preachers to London again if elected Mayor:

“I won’t ask Qaradawi to drive the 210 bus”

That’s how aware of and sensitive he is to London’s Jews, and how seriously he takes their feelings about Israeli suicide bus bombings.

And in case you think I'm making too much of an unfortunate foot-in-mouth moment, Livingstone expressed amazement at what he said was the audience's "obsession with Qaradawi. He also said,

Livingstone carefully avoided saying anything about any other hate preachers, which he was repeatedly questioned about, gave no undertakings, despite being repeatedly urged, not to invite or welcome more of them, and maintained his line that he knew nothing but good of Qaradawi when he invited him. And he's still unwilling to accept the repeatedly and widely documented record of Qaradawi's misogyny and homophobia, as well as his anti-semitism should mean he revises his original opnion to one of condemnation.

The wish to improve the reach of the 210 bus route, by the way, exercises many in London’s most orthodox Jewish communities, because it’s the nearest route to a direct connection between Stamford Hill and Golders Green, the two largest centres of Charedi Jews in London. Only so far, it involves having to get off the bus and change at Finsbury Park Station.

If anyone has any doubts about what a totally dishonest performance the whole thing was, here's my transcription of what Livingstone actually said– with a degree of passion and intensity of feeling that was wholly absent fromTuesday’s performance– about his real feelings about Israel, at the Trafalgar Square Gaza rally in 2009.

Let’s send a message directly to the Israeli government: if you think you can win votes by the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children, you are wrong.

That is what is happening. In an attempt to outflank the even more abominable Netanyahu, they are prepared to unleash this terror.

And this has to end. When we campaigned here and many of these faces—Tony Benn, George Galloway and many others, were here in this square were here again and again to demand an end to Apartheid, demand justice for black South Africans. And that was crushed in just over four decades.

The Palestinians continue to suffer now into a seventh decade of oppression and near-slavery.

What we see in Gaza is a ghetto. A ghetto in which people cannot achieve their potential. A ghetto in which death rains down. This is obscene.

And if it was any other conflict, world leaders would be queueing up to denounce it.

But there’s a double standard at work. And that double standard is wrong.

I heard Gordon Brown denounce Apartheid year by year by year.

I want him to denounce the oppression of the Palestinian people. I want our government to say, “If you behave like savages, we will not send an Ambassador to Israel. We shall be withdrawing our Ambassador. We shall be convening a meeting of European Union leaders to say, “Why should we tolerate the importation of goods grown on stolen land, whilst the people dispossessed from that land look on from the camps where they’ve been incarcerated for over sixty years. “”

In the same way that Apartheid was doomed to fail, the attempt to deny the Palestinian people their right will fail as well, because it’s an injustice that screams out to be rectified.

And although so many world leaders seem to be frightened to condemn the Israeli government, when I did my radio programme this morning, the calls supporting Palestine as opposed to Israel were three or four to one in favour of justice for the Palestinian people.

Here in this square, that is London’s central square, know this: that Londoners by a vast majority want to see an end to the oppression of Palestinian people. They want to see justice for Palestine. This city recognises that.

I think we need to say, we will not tolerate year by year of this oppression.

Don’t complain when young men launch their rockets, when that’s all you’ve left them the right to do.

One of the most revealing aspects of the dishonesty of Livingstone's performance becomes apparent if you look at his body language on Tuesday's meeting. His whole LJF performance comes across as that of a bored machine politician. There's no passion in his voice. Look at his body language. His facial expressions are bland, but his hand gestures are dismissive, constantly flipping and brushing away. He sits as part of a solid phalanx behind the tables, like a man who's most at ease behind the platform barrier of an old-style party machine.

Contrast that to the obvious passion in his facial expressions and his voice when he's ranting on in Trafalgar Square with his real political convictions about the Israeli government as the equivalent of the South African Apartheid regime and the supposed enslavers in camps and ghettos of the Palestinians for the last sixty years.

And here's another contrast-- a clip of Boris Johnson answering questions at the equivalent London Jewish Forum meeting just a week earlier. Boris chooses to stand and engage with the audience. His hand gestures reach out towards the audience, and his facial expressions show him relishing spontaneously knocking his own official and a fellow Tory London politician--"the Councillor from Barnet" as well as enjoying some opportunities to make jokes at Livingstone's expense.

Livingstone has rightly said that the Mayoral contest isn't about electing a chat show host. But it is about electing a Mayor who seems genuinely interested and engaged in interacting with people outside the party machine, who responds with more than just the entirely predictable line, and who seems ready to acknowledge their own shortcomings and say openly when their own administration isn't serving the voters well enough.

Make your own judgement between these two candidates as to who's more engaged and responsive to the what the Jewish community says it's concerned about, and who's more concerned to explain to that community why their perceptions are mistaken and their concerns about anti-semitism and hate preachers aren't worth worrying about. And consider also whether the way the meeting with Livingstone was conducted really enabled Jewish Londoners to press Livingstone and get real answers to his attitudes to hate preachers and taking their concerns seriously.

By the way, there's one thing that both the London Jewish Forum and the Jewish Leadership Council deserve huge credit and applause for. That's the quality of the spreads they provided for both the breakfast meeting with Boris Johnson and the meeting with Ken Livingstone. I don't know which kosher caterer they hired, but the food was good enough to have been served at an upscale wedding reception. And perhaps it's only at a Jewish community event that a free spread of that quality would be served in abundance for all comers.

Fiyaz Mughal of an organization called "Faith Matters" has written a very moving and interesting account of his visit to Poland, to learn about the Jewish community of the past and present, and of the history of the Holocaust. It has been posted on "Harry's Place" under the title "Most Roads Lead Back to Poland". This post started as a comment on his post, but it turned into an open letter to him:

Dear Fiyaz

Your post is a moving account of your experience. I'm touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more.
I'm very surprised, though, at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles--not just those you label "collaborators" and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions.
For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles" which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way.
Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as "Righteous Gentiles" those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives--and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved.
However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast -- it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946.
There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages.
Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can't be sure because I've never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels.
What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans.
You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study.
However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles.
You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.

The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken--they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding.
And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man's land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp--till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths?
Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin--they could have taken Austrian or German nationality.) They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins' house in Krakow.
The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.

It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not.
So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it's biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles.
And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula "as a Muslim", which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry's Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this "As A" is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need to be representative.
I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies.

I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews.

In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That's why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans.
But if I wrote "as a Jew" it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase "as a Jew", because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write "as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew". Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, "like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition".
I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That's why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed "judyk113' you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote.
So, Fiyaz, I'm just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation "as a Muslim" as I am of someone saying "as a Jew". It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker's presence.
And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories.
I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived.
Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.

And still it falls, and the sky is that solid muddy grey that signals another thick blanket ready to descend.

Here's my road, with a bunch of teenagers out enjoying their day off school and the unprecedented opportunity to toboggan down the middle of the road on a tea-tray.

Out on my deck, there's an almost silence. Usually I can hear a distant constant humming, the sound of the North Circular, the busiest road in London. Now, there's almost nothing. Just wind sighing in the trees and the occasional flop of a fistful of snow falling off a vine.

I've only seen one intrepid milk float on the road since eight this morning. Nothing else on the move. All the buses cancelled. Almost all the schools shut.

Last night, I drove home through a blizzard. I emailed my daughter to say that was the first time I'd done that since the time I lived out in rural Berkshire, before she was born. Then at half past one in the morning, she emailed back to say she and her husband (both aged 23) and a bunch of their friends had just come in from being out playing in the snow. Cambridge snowbound at midnight. It must have looked stunning.

I do realise this must make Canadians and most northern USA folk laugh their socks off. Five inches of snow can be almost guaranteed to shut everything down in the UK.

There was our Mayor, Boris Johnson, on Radio 4 at 1pm, valiantly inventing new verb conjugations to convey the frantic intensity of the London gritting team's unsuccessful efforts to get the roads cleared:

We gritted, we grat, we grut, he said. But when you get that much snow, there's just nowhere to put it.

Sending up the notorious "leaves on the line" British Rail apologies for the regular breakdowns of service every time the first major Autumn storm brings the fall, he also said

This is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities

You have to give the man credit. He'd actually cycled all the way from Highbury to his mayoral office. And the dreaded Red Ken would never have carried off that apology for failure with such charm and good humour.

Hmmm. Weather forecast on Radio 4 just said we're due for another foot of snow in the next few hours.

There are a lot of legends about encounters between Napoleon and the Jews, just as there are about encounters between Alexander the Great and Jews. In both cases, the Jews' ambivalent but ultimately admiring relationship with these world-changing rulers is reflected in the substance of the tales told. They usually show the great ruler learning to admire some aspect of Jewish tenacity in adversity.

One of the ones I always remember about Napoleon is where he's reputed to have passed by a synagogue where he could hear the congregation wailing the mourning chants of the Tisha B'Av service, Tisha B'Av being the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It's a major fast commemorating the fall on that day of the First and Second temples of Jerusalem, during which Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations is read. When it's explained to him that the Jews he hears are weeping for a loss which took place 1,800 years earlier, he's said to have said:

I vow that this people is destined for a future in their own homeland. For is there any other people who have kept alive similar mourning and hope for so many years?"

Sunday was the 17th Tammuz. For observant orthodox Jews, that's a whole day fast which marks the start of a three week period of mourning, commemorating the beginning of the end of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It culminated in the destruction on the 9th of Av of the Second Temple and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. Most mainstream Jews hardly know of this three week period, though all know of Tisha b'Av, but for those who do, it has some surprisingly effective ways of opening your heart to the sorrows it commemorates. You are not supposed to play or listen to music--and that makes a huge difference in my daily life. You are also supposed to refrain from buying new clothes and cutting your hair. Usually I remember to get mine cut just before the three week period starts. This year, I lost the plot and didn't get it done. So I'll look rather scruffier than I usually do for the next three weeks.

Unlike the major fasts of Tisha B'Av and Yom Kippur, the Fast of 17th Tammuz is one of those you usually observe individually rather than communally.

When I went to the synagogue, I heard the mother of one of the youth group organizers say that they hoped they might get perhaps twenty people attending. By the time the service started, it was packed--even more women than men, with some of them having to stand.

It was quite a low key event, but I was conscious from having spent so much time since the prisoner exchange following the reactions of the UK, Israeli and international media, as well as Israeli bloggers, of the collective sadness that for once united the secular and the religious Israeli public, all too often a non-dialogue of the deaf.

On the same day, Imshin, who, like so many secular Jews, tends to find her spiritual sustenance in Buddhism rather than Judaism, was visiting Jerusalem, and found herself walking up the steps of part of the destroyed Temple. That experience connected with her in a way that I wouldn't have expected:

Here I was standing at the foot of the actual steps that led up to the Second Temple all those years ago. It wasn’t just an old story. It wasn’t a myth. It really happened. And I am a descendant of these people who came to this place to worship....

I always get a bit teary at the Wall, and I’m never sure why. Friday was no exception, standing at the foot of those steps.

I always thought it was all this spirituality in the air that got to me. But perhaps it’s something deeper than that.

When we went over to see Robinson’s Arch , or what’s left of it, the enormity of the destruction really hit me and I was very sad. This has never happened to me before. I must have needed to be able to envision this as a real place, for me to begin to understand the terrible tragedy of what happened back then.

These are actual stones from the outer wall of Herod’s Temple, bearing the distinct features of Herodian masonry, excavated just as you see them, apparently toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple.

And as these things always happen, today was the 17th of Tamouz, believed to be the day the Romans broke through the city walls (among other things), all those years ago (precisely 1938 years I think, if I’m not miscounting).

Then I checked out Karen's Tel-Aviv Diary, as I usually do. She's also a militantly secular Israeli, but being the daughter of Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors and a fluent Yiddishist herself, she's closer to the traditions of the religion than you might imagine. She is bearing so much beyond the collective grief over the outcome of the prisoners' return-- a tragic family bereavement, the loss of a young nephew after a cruel illness, a husband undergoing chemotherapy, and more.

And in memory of the young man, but perhaps also all the public collective grief over the dead hostage soldiers, she put up on her diary blog a poignant, searing poem by Yehuda Amichai which she had long ago translated. Her translation appeared in the Tel-Aviv Review in 1998, which most English readers, including myself, have no knowledge of.

It commemorates the death--possibly also after a long period of struggle--of someone close to Amichai and yet it also commemorates the pain of some of the legacies that all Jews share.

I'm increasingly spending most of my radio listening time to BBC Radio 3--uncompromisingly traditional and high modernist classical music rounded off with first class world music every night--since I came back online. Radio 4's relentless anti-Blair, anti-Bush, anti-Israel take on just about any news story they can shoehorn it into has got beyond my listening tolerance. The final straw was the very prominent platformm the Today programme gave to the raving fringe Islamist extremist Abu Izzadeen through an interview last week.

Tonight, Radio 3 has been running a wonderful extended feature commemorating the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its crushing by the Soviet Union in the November of that year. The link takes you to a page which should enable you to listen to the whole 2 hours and 45 minutes of it. Listen in if you can.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model has a cracking post on the symmetry between the current state of the terror war in Iraq and the current Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas war:

In both cases we see a weak government suffering to control a powerful militia that is challenging the will of the rest of the country and engaging in a proxy war making the people suffer the results of regional conflicts that in no way can benefit their country.

He puts the finger on Iran:

Iran proved that it's able to drag the region into a state of chaos by maneuvering its tools in Syria, Hizbollah, Hamas and the militias in Iraq. Iran knows that such a conflict directed by militias that blend with civilians will lead to long-lasting chaos and represents a half-solution that debilitates the other powers and at the same time it's not a costly tactic for Iran! A 100 million dollars in the hands of gangs are enough to cause a lot of destruction that cannot be cured by billions in reconstruction, and it always costs less to destruct than to build.

The key point in this strategy is to keep the half-solution alive. This method proved successful in keeping the despotic regimes in power for decades and these regimes think this strategy is still valid. What makes them this way is their interpretation of international comments which came almost exactly as they always do; calls for restraint and urging a cease-fire which they (Iran and her allies) think will mean eventually going back to negotiations which they know very well how to keep moving in an empty circle.That was clear from Nesrallah's earlier speech when he said "whether today or a month or a year from now, the Israelis will sooner or later find themselves forced to negotiate…"

Contrast the treatment of the Israeli actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon in this report and this one

a fourth day of Israeli strikes sparked by Hezbollah's capture of two soldiers.

Fouad Siniora urged the UN to supervise a truce to end Israeli raids that have killed more than 80 Lebanese......Warplanes fired rockets on the Lebanon-Syrian border and hit the centre of Beirut for the first time.

Eighteen Lebanese civilians, including women and children, were killed on the coastal road to the southern city of Tyre when their vehicles were struck by missiles as they fled a village. ....

The Israeli forces attacked them on the Shamma road and their bodies litter the road," he said.

Medical sources have said around half the passengers were children or teenagers.

Relatives have since blamed Unifil for the deaths, and some have pelted peacekeepers with stones in anger.

"If they had taken people in to begin with then they would never have died," Mohammed Oqla, speaking from a hospital where the injured were taken, told Reuters news agency.

with the BBC's reporting here of this action by British forces against the Taleban in Afghanistan:

British troops in Afghanistan have undertaken their biggest operation since the fall of the Taleban in 2001.

Three hundred soldiers - backed by hundreds of American and Canadian troops - have taken control of Sangin in the southern province of Helmand.

Six British troops have been killed in or near the town in recent weeks.

Military chiefs earlier defended their decision to call in US planes to drop 500lb bombs on Taleban fighters in the nearby town of Nawzad.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Sangin fighting, which has left 10 Taleban dead.

Apache helicopters led the way early on Saturday for Chinooks which dropped the British troops on the ground - much of the fighting force of 3 Para battle group.

They were backed up by a further 700 coalition troops.

They sealed off the town and targeted a number of compounds which are being searched.

Captain Drew Gibson, spokesman for British forces in Helmand, said the situation was "all quiet" as night fell, but the large contingent remained in the area.

A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman said it was an ongoing 'cordon and search' operation

A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman said it was an ongoing 'cordon and search' operation.

"The purpose of it is to disrupt Taleban activities which in recent weeks have included attacks on both Afghan security forces and coalition forces in this area," she said.

"During this operation suspected Taleban opened fire on UK helicopters from at least one location with at least four RPGs and in response to this a single missile and 30 rounds of a 30mm cannon were returned.

"When the firing point was later secured, two dead Taleban were found. Four Afghan women were also found in the vicinity, one of whom had been slightly hurt."

Three soldiers suffered minor injuries, and were all expected to make full recoveries. Capt Gibson said only one of them was hurt as a direct result of enemy action

Earlier military chiefs denied killing civilians when US planes, called in by UK troops, dropped 500lb bombs on Taleban fighters in Nawzad.

Witnesses said there were many killed and injured, and a school was among the buildings hit, but UK forces said there was no evidence of this.

My usual insatiable curiosity at that time about whether googlebombing actually worked led me to check out the theory over a couple of days by repeatedly googling on "Egypt." As far as I could see, it wasn't working, though the number of hits on googling the phrase "Free Alaa" went up at the very impressive rate of 57,000 links to 336,000 links.

Tonight, if you google "Free Alaa", you will get over 1,000,000 links, which I'm impressed by. But you still won't find Free Alaa anywhere amongst the top pages if you google "Egypt". Hardly suprising, because there are 344,000,000 links for that.

The Egyptian bloggers Sandmonkey and Big Pharaoh both link to a fellow Egyptian blogger activist, the Arabist, who reports that Alaa was made to undergo a roughing up and sleep deprivation after his release was announced, and before he was let out yesterday. This is what happened:

I spoke with his wife Manal. She says Alaa was moved from Tora prisonto 3omraniya police station last night, for the notorious bureaucraticpaper work. Alaa was locked up in a tiny cell, full of criminals, someof whom are high on drugs and others are armed with knives and sharpobjects, Manal said. Scuffles have broken out inside the cell betweenthe criminals, who reportedly hit Alaa several times. Alaa spent thenight standing on his feet, coz there was no room for him to sleep inthat filthy cell. According to Manal, he managed to call her on themobile phone, and he sounded in a very bad state.

Reading the whole story of his arrest, three repeated re-imprisonments and then the brutal cat-and-mouse of the last day of his imprisonment reminds me so much of the methods of the KGB as described so vividly in Anne Applebaum's Gulag and of course a host of incredibleprisonermemoires.

Perhaps that's not surprising, because Egypt used to be a client state of the Soviet Union.

Of course, what he suffered, bad as it was, pales beside what they went through. No-one who was a KGB prisoner managed to get uncensored letters smuggled out, let alone use a phone, as Alaa did.

But the great irony is that the Egyptian state still seems more wedded to the old totalitarian ways than it is to the ways of democracy, for all that it's seen as a US client state these days.

Which is why the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seems to be able to represent itself as a champion of democracy in Egypt, when its aim is for the establishment of a caliphate totalitarian state.

Was the roughing up Alaa received a two-fingers response to the campaign to release him? It will be worth seeing how Glenn Reynolds, who previously claimed that blogger campaigns had led to an earlier imprisoned democracy activist being freed by the Egyptian authorities, reads the situation now.

I was thinking of writing a post called "The one US defeat I wouldn't be sorry to see".

That's a US defeat in their forthcoming World Cup match with Ghana.

As you'll know if you've read my recent posts, I have no real interest in the football itself, but I am fascinated by the associated politics of identity.

And I was knocked out by the obvious joy and delight with which John Pantsil of Ghana celebrated their win over the hotshots of the Czech Republic by.... waving an Israeli flag, which he'd kept hidden in his shoe.

I do know her real name, but I always think of her as Mrs Cleansleeves.

That's the name of my local dry cleaners ,which she and her family run. It's always a pleasure to go there, because there she is with her infectious smile and wry good humour. Customer service and relations: brilliant. She should be running the National Health Service.

She's never failed to retrieve whatever garments I've lost the tickets for. The family does serious wizardry with the most impossible stains, and they'll sometimes put a garment through three or four cleans just to make sure it's perfect.

Our relationship got onto a new level of mutual interest and confidence when she admired one of my favourite dresses, and I told her I'd got it for ten pounds in a charity shop.

Oh, she said, I'd never have thought you could get anything as good as that in a charity shop.

So then followed the discussion of where you can find the charity shops that are full of such things. Mainly, they're in districts where some of the residents only wear an outfit a couple of times before they turn it in so they can make room in their mega-wardrobes for the next must-have thing. But there is this one up in north Finchley where you can find the most amazing stuff if you hit it on a lucky day, and the people who donate books read all the same stuff I like to read.